Rise of the Machines

Illustrations
US Army Air Force B-17G Flying Fortress, with ventral ball turret,
dropping its bombs in 1944/45.

The merging of human and machine, made more urgent by warfare on an
industrial scale, was best captured by Alfred Crimi, an Italian-born
modernist painter working for the Sperry Corporation, here in aturret
drawing, 1943. Courtesy of Northrop Grumman Corporation.

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The trailer version of the SCR-584 automatic tracking radar, a system
designed for fire control in air defense and used by the British Anti-
Aircraft Command against German V-1 attacks at the end of World War
II, as conceived by a US Army artist.

The world’s first cruise missile was the German buzz bomb, or V-1. To
contemporaries, it was a robot. In 1944, a “war of the robots”—in the
words of the head of the British air defense—ensued over the English
Channel.

The SCR-584 had 140 vacuum tubes, weighed 10 tons, and cost about
$100,000. Combined with the new proximity “VT” fuse, the SCR-584
offered an effective defense against the V-1.

One of the secret “sea forts” positioned by theRoyal Navy in the Thames
Estuary during World War II to protect London. The forts werean effective
defense against German attacks.

Norbert Wiener’s initial cybernetic research was a $2,325 defense contract
approved in December 1940. Here, Wiener (center) is pictured withtwo
senior army officers: Brigadier General Leonard Greely (left) and Colonel
Donald B. Diehl (right).

In the summer of 1946, Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” from the
Greek kubernetes, for “steersman,” inspired by observing man-machine
servomechanical systems at war.

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W. Ross Ashby was an early British cyberneticist and innovator. He built
the homeostat in 1946, a contraption then touted as the world’s first
“thinking machine,” based on Royal Air Force bomb switches.

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Ashby’s homeostat was not just self-adaptive, but both system and
environment at the same time. At a 1953 meeting, the machine deeply
impressed Gregory Bateson, who became a key figure in counterculture.

Ashby with his homeostat. The machine’s purpose was to do nothing, to
remain in balance when disturbed.

Ashby’s laboratory at Barnwood House, a mental hospitalnear Gloucester,
in the English West Country.

Wiener in a classroom at MIT in May 1949 with the primitive robot
known as Palomilla. The photographer was Alfred Eisenstaedt, famous for
the image of the sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day.

Julian Bigelow (far left) and John von Neumann (far right) closely
collaborated with Wiener. Also pictured are Herman Goldstine (second
left), one of the original ENIAC developers; and Robert Oppenheimer
(second right), “father” of the atomic bomb. They stand in front of the IAS
computer that was used in the American hydrogen bomb project.

J. C. R. Licklider, a pivotal computer science pioneer, took part in
Wiener’s early cybernetic discussion circles in Boston.

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The US Air Force’s response to the Soviet bomber threat was theSemi-
Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), which logged the course, speed,
altitude, and location of all aircraft flying over North America at any given
moment. The first sector at McGuire Air Force Base near Trenton, New
Jersey, became operational in July 1958.

One of SAGE’s many innovations was the light gun, a new input device
and ancestor of the touch screen. SAGE was an inspiration for science
fiction; the war room in Stanley Kubrik’s Dr. Strangelove is one example.

The interior of SAGE Combat Center CC-01 at Hancock Field, New York.

Fear of push-button war and of losing labor to machines was ripein the
1950s, as Leslie Illingworth’s “Friend or Foe?” cartoon in theJune 29,
1955, issue of Punch magazine intimates. Copyright Punch Limited.

311

The world’s first cyborg was a rat in a lab at Rockland State Hospital, New
York, in 1960.

Manfred Clynes, the researcher who came up with the cyborg idea, had
this framed image in his office for years. The picture, by space-age
illustrator Fred Freeman, a World War II navy veteran, was published in
Life magazine on July 11, 1960.

Alice Mary Hilton—an author, organizer, and acolyte of Norbert Wiener
—was one of the most passionate and eloquent proponents of automation.
By 1963, Hilton worked hard to bring about the “age of cyberculture.”

By late 1969, the US Army hoped to use the four-legged walking truckto
carry loads and weapons into the jungles of Vietnam, through ditchesand
slopes impassable by wheeled vehicles.

An unidentified model poses in the gentle grips of the 80-ton Electric
Beetle, one of the feedback-driven cybernetic anthropomorphous
machines(or CAMs) built in 1962 by General Electric for the US Air Force
tohandle radioactive material for nuclear aircraft propulsion.

The US Army’s Pedipulator, built in 1964, was a study of a two-legged
walking machine manufactured by General Electric.

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Handyman—“man” stood for “manipulator”—tried to combine man and
machine into “an intimate, symbiotic unit that will perform essentially as
one wedded system,” wrote GE’s Ralph Mosher (left) in 1967.

Hardiman, a man-augmentation system built for the US Navy around
1970, had thirty powered joints and could lift its own weight plus 1,500
pounds.

Anthropologist and social theorist Gregory Bateson was part of the
original cybernetic Macy conferences and later applied cybernetics on a
higher level, articulating his theory in the 1972 cult book Steps to an
Ecology of Mind.
Barry Schwartz Photography.

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The first issue of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was published in
1968. It was meant to be a printed feedback loop for back-to-the-land
communards, and it reviewed six books on cybernetics.

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Stewart Brand (left) and company play with the Earth Ball at the New
Games, an event that Brand organized in California, October 1, 1973.©
Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS.

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Stewart Brand holds a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog on July 6,
1984.That same year, he launched the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or
WELL, the first real computerized social network. © Roger
Ressmeyer/CORBIS.

The US Air Force pioneered the concept of “virtual space” in the late
1970s. Staff Sergeant Vernon Wells is shown here with the visually
coupled airborne systems simulator (VCASS) at the Armstrong Aerospace
Medical Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, June 1,
1985.

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Typical computer-generated imagery projected inside thepilot’s helmet of
the VCASS.

Timothy Leary speaking at the Barbizon Hotel in Amsterdam on May 10,
1987. The psychedelics pioneer and counterculture guru of the 1960s had
discovered the computer as a mind-expanding device in the early 1980s.

These psychedelic Buddha screens illustrated Timothy Leary’s 1988
announcement in Reality Hackers magazine: reality no longerhad a
monopoly on stimulation in the “post-industrial cyber-era.”It was the first
text on the new virtual-reality trend.

Science fiction author William Gibson. In a 1982 short story, he coined the
term “cyberspace” to describe the virtual space inside machines.

Mondo 2000, a San Francisco underground magazine, shaped the
cyberpunk aesthetic between 1989 and 1993. It linked psychedelic drugs,
virtual reality, and the rise of computer networks, as this typical
illustration shows.

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The group attending Michael Benedikt’s Cyberconf, May 1990. Of note in
this photo are John Perry Barlow (tall in the first row); to Barlow’s left,
Sandy Stone; to Barlow’s right, Howard Rheingold, and then gaming
theorist Brenda Laurel, followed by Michael and Amelie Benedikt. Behind
the Benedikts stands Nicole Stenger, and behind her are Habitat pioneers
Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer.

French virtual-reality artist Nicole Stenger, in VPL gear. Stenger gaveone
of the most widely read presentations at Cyberconf: “Mind Isa Leaking
Rainbow.”

Jaron Lanier, founder of the virtual-reality company VPL, wearing one of
the company’s prototypes, the head-mounted display as an output device.

Virtual-reality gloves and full-body data suit prototypes developed by
VPL. Lanier envisioned goggles, gloves, and suits as the future of human-
machine interaction, enabling users to “enter” cyberspace.

A full-body data suit by VPL.

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A data suit diagram by VPL.

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An early virtual-reality machine, similar to the devices on display at
theWhole Earth Institute’s Cyberthon in October 1990.

A Mondo 2000 illustration of “cyberspace,” the “new frontier” that could
be “colonized.” The virtual open range inside the machine was a mythical
dimension where physics, laws, and identities would have new meanings,
with its walls held up by cryptography.

One of the most persistent topics of human-machine interaction in
cyberspace was sex. In the summer of 1990, colorful writer Howard
Rheingold coined the memorable term “teledildonics” to describe futuristic
forms of bodily interaction through machine interfaces.

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Mondo 2000’s guide to cyberpunk, laced with irony.

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Former Wyoming cattle rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist, and gifted writer
John Perry Barlow was one of the most charismatic figures “in
cyberspace” in the early 1990s. He covered and shaped the early tech
counterculture and cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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In a military library in Virginia, EFF cofounder John Gilmore discovered a
coveted classified document that the NSA had refused to release to him,
and he confronted the government. Here he celebrates his victory in late
1992.

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Timothy C. May, an early Intel employee, was the most eloquent
cypherpunk and one of the most radical. He wrote the “Crypto Anarchist
Manifesto,” came up with BlackNet in August 1993, and coined phrases
like “crypto = guns.”

Tim May (left), John Gilmore (right), and Eric Hughes, who appeared
wearing these masks on the cover of Wired magazine’s second issue, in
May 1993, their PGP fingerprints written on their foreheads.

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Ryan Lackey, inspired by the cypherpunks, ran HavenCo, a desolate
anarchist server platform in the North Sea, starting in late 1999.

HavenCo operated from Roughs Tower, a repurposed old World War IIsea
fort located about 7 nautical miles off the Suffolk coast.

HavenCo lacked both bandwith and demand from customers. Its server
racks were never full, and the business venture failed. By September 2001,
Lackey operated a cypherpunk remailer from the air defense platform.

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Owen Davies’s article “Robotic Warriors Clash in Cyberwars,” published
in Omni magazine in January 1987, was illustrated with this painting by
Paul Lehr.

Businessman, author, and organizer Winn Schwartau coined the phrase
“electronic Pearl Harbor” in January 1991. This illustration by Harry
Whitver conveys Schwartau’s conception of the new security threats.

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This photo of an aviator’s night vision system illustrated a 1992 Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists article that predicted “cyberwar,” described as war
fought through “robots” and autonomous weapons.

Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, announcing on August 11,
1999, the creation of the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force-Computer Network
Defense (JTC-CND), the unit that would come to lead the Moonlight Maze
investigation.

The trove of files taken by the Moonlight Maze attackers was vast—“as
high as the Washington Monument,” if piled up, said an internal
government report in 1999.

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By late 1998, the Moonlight Maze investigation was so labor-intensive and
stressful that members of the FBI’s coordination group made their own T-
shirt as a souvenir, with “Byte Back!” printed on the back.